Last week, I presented some highlights of the new features for SG Procedures and GTL in SAS 9.4. Now, let us dig in a bit deeper. For a plot without a GROUP role, setting an attributes was always easy with SG procedures. All you need to do to set bar color
Did you know that more than 30,000 Americans die in traffic accidents every year? Interestingly, the U.S. import of mangoes from Brazil is found to be highly correlated with this fatality rate, as shown in the graph below. But are mango imports a good indicator of the future traffic fatality
This blog post focuses on clarifying what's important in integrated marketing managment, as shown in the second of three sections, titled Orchestration and Interaction. Often when I mention this product category – I receive perplexing looks due to the name we have given to this section in the full IMM visual. Previously we
This week's SAS tip is from Lauren Haworth, Cynthia L. Zender, and Michele Burlew's book Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond. This example-driven book includes broad coverage of some of the best features of ODS. To learn more about the book and the authors, visit our Web catalog to read
To say that I'm excited about the SAS 9.4 release is an understatement! For example, did you know that in SAS 9.4, you can write SAS/Graph output directly to a Powerpoint slide?!? This is definitely an item that was on my "wish list," and will no doubt make life a
The high school dropout rate in the United States is simply abysmal. Dr. Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS, has cited this problem as a core reason for developing SAS Curriculum Pathways and for providing it at no cost. Many outstanding organizations are working to increase graduation rates, and we
SAS® 9.4--Enable, simplify and innovate with more deployment options! July 10 marked the beginning of the "SAS 9.4 Era"--the next step in the evolution of SAS. This newest platform release offers product enhancements galore, more deployment choices than ever, simplified administration and more. I thought you might find it useful
SAS 9.4 releases today with a ton of new features. As eloquently stated by Craig Rubendall, the driving themes are "Enable. Simplify. Innovate". The same sentiment applies to the ODS Graphics, with a ton of new features for the SG Procedures, GTL and ODS Graphics Designer. In the next few articles,
My first post in this series provided an integrated marketing management visual of the full customer intelligence process. Admittedly, marketing is big and complex, so I thought I would help to take a section at a time to highlight what's important. In that colorful disk-shaped schematic, there are three sections that “float” on top of
I don’t think people typically think of administration as a fun thing, but it really was fun talking to SAS administrators at SAS Global Forum this year. There seemed to always be a crowd around the administration demo station. We had quite a few super demos and papers, and we
Most of us will have at least a few road trips this summer (some longer than others). Traveling in the car doesn’t mean you have to give up your healthy habits. It just takes a little planning.
Are you still using the old RANUNI, RANNOR, RANBIN, and other "RANXXX" functions to generate random numbers in SAS? If so, here are six reasons why you should switch from these older (1970s) algorithms to the newer (late 1990s) Mersenne-Twister algorithm, which is implemented in the RAND function. The newer
I’ve got a book recommendation for you – it came recommended to me and did not disappoint. “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, by Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is actually a psychologist (Professor emeritus at Princeton Univ), and his Nobel Prize winning work on decision theory will also remind
SAS 9.3 already has smooth (anti-aliased) lines in SAS/GRAPH device=png output, and in SAS 9.4 you will also get smooth lines in your device=gif output (and gif animations)! Woo-hoo!!! Here are a couple of simple examples to demonstrate: The first example is device=gif Proc Gmap output. If you look very closely, you'll notice that
Having the right perspective matters in marketing. In particular, having the big picture view in mind while focusing on issues at hand or dealing with specific parts of the marketing function allows us to quickly prioritize tasks or even whole projects. I am sure we would all agree that marketing has become a complex
The DELETE procedure is probably the most well-known and most-used SAS procedure that isn't actually documented or officially supported. That is, that was the case before the release of SAS 9.4, when PROC DELETE returns with more features than ever -- including a production-quality status. In his SAS Global Forum
Being an author can be a tough gig. Lots of writing, reviews, edits, cover approvals…the list goes on and on. But often the good times outweigh the tough times. And we’re so lucky that many of our authors have written more than one book for SAS Press. One such author
“How can we begin to make sense of the unstructured data, when we still don’t make the most of our structured data?” said the exasperated senior manager from a large retail firm. One of the great pleasures of my job is the relationship with students that continues after class has
SAS Curriculum Pathways is more than just a product. In many ways, we're a family. Lots of us have worked here for over a decade and love what we do. Part of the reason for starting this blog is to give you a little behind-the-scenes tour of how we operate:
Tried, tested and true -- I’m sure you already practice some, if not all, of these efficient techniques to save resources. I recently shared these 10 techniques with the Wisconsin Illinois SAS users group in Milwaukee. The conference ran smoothly under the incredibly able guidance of Dr. LeRoy Bessler. I’ll
Four authors. Four papers. One set of data. The month of August and the 2014 Call for Content are just around the corner, and this seems like a good time to share a little inspiration and innovation. The Foundations and Fundamentals paper section at SAS Global Forum 2013 featured a four-part
Every programming language has an IF-THEN statement that branches according to whether a Boolean expression is true or false. In SAS, the IF-THEN (or IF-THEN/ELSE) statement evaluates an expression and braches according to whether the expression is nonzero (true) or zero (false). The basic syntax is if numeric-expression then do-computation;
Conventional or Organic? That is the question. Research varies about whether organic foods are healthier than conventional foods. However, one of the biggest arguments for buying organic is in regards to pesticide exposure. Convincing evidence is revealing that the pesticides we eat, drink and inhale are stored in our bodies
If, like me, you have children who are old enough to vote, you may have noticed what I have noticed. They’re different. They seem permanently connected to their friends via social media, rarely watch the news or read a paper, and they have many transient interests that seem to follow
On the Web site for the book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software, I provide instructions on how to download the sample data sets and install them so that they can be used from within SAS/IML Studio. When I wrote the book I did not anticipate that SAS users might want
There are big opportunities in store for business in Brian Solis’ vision of the future, just as there are equally big opportunities for customers. They emanate from the importance of shared experiences, taking place with connected customers and which are fueled by great technologies. As is often the case, these
Inspired by the JMP blog - Statisticians: harbingers of doom?: Enjoy what's left of the International Year of Statistics -- while you still can.
In my last post, I introduced the hardware solutions (such as a virtual IP switch or IP load balancer) that enable client applications to access services regardless of whether they are running on a primary or a failover server in a grid-enabled environment configured with high availability. In this post,
As I wrote in my previous post, a SAS customer noticed that he was getting some duplicate values when he used the RAND function to generate a large number of random uniform values on the interval [0,1]. He wanted to know if this result indicates a bug in the RAND
When I work on SAS projects that create lots of files as results, it's often a requirement that those files be organized in a certain folder structure. The exact structure depends on the project, but here's an example: /results |__ html |__ images |__ xls |__ data Before you can
